Speaker
Description
Recent studies in political science have revealed a counterintuitive phenomenon: American partisans systemically underestimate the heterogeneity of opinions within each party. Yet, they correctly perceive each party’s mean opinion. Since these studies were published, political scientists have speculated about the causes and effects of this phenomenon, but their results have remained vague due to insufficient temporal data for empirical analysis. We develop an individual-based model showing that such systemic misperception can emerge from well-understood local behavioral and interaction biases. We take the model to its continuum limit and, within a subset of the parameter space, we analytically show the emergence of partisan misperception and its dependence on system properties. We then extend the model to a second slower timescale via an opinion dynamics framework, where we demonstrate a mechanistic link between partisan misperception and political polarization. We hope to eventually be able to inform the development of tools that can mitigate polarization and radicalization, strategies that have the potential to be particularly effective because they leverage nonlinear feedback mechanisms already documented in the United States political system.
